


Wrench in the Works

by Churbooseanon



Series: Guns For Hire [8]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Guns For Hire AU, Mercenaries, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 04:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2493614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some stories start on Adaptive. Some come to be there. The woman who would come to be known as the blade wielding mercenary simply titled CT was really a bit of both. This is her story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My CT Appreciation Week story is going a bit long, so it will be multi-chapter. So enjoy this exploration of a possible origin story for CT within the Guns For Hire AU created by Synnesai of Tumblr.

There were a lot of things in Connie's life that fell firmly into the category of 'well how the fuck did that happen?' Top of that list was typically reserved for 'how the hell did I end up on Adaptive again', though at the moment she found that question nowhere near as pressing as 'why the fuck am I in this hallway with nothing but a long metal pipe' and 'how the hell am I getting out of here alive?' 

But to answer either of those would be jumping in near the end of the story, and really, who did that? 

No. The reason she was here, hiding just around the corner from three men with fully automatic assault rifles in a stolen military grade helmet with blood oozing slowly down her arm from below a hasty bandage made from a strip of her shirt, waiting for the right moment to strike, well... that took some telling to get to, didn't it?

* * * * * *

For the life of her, Constance “Connie” Rebecca Tourville could not begin to explain how she had gotten here. Not, she supposed, that it really needed explaining, at the moment at least. What she needed at the moment was to quickly try to figure out which pocket she had stowed her claim slips in as she shuffled down the aisle to a cheery female voice being piped out over the speakers that were set high into the walls every few feet. 

“The crew of the _Necessitas_ would like to thank you for choosing us for your interstellar travel needs,” the woman, or maybe simulated voice, breezed. “We hope you'll consider traveling with _CIT_ again in the future. Please keep in an orderly line and check in with customs upon your arrival. Please also consider stopping by the Charon Industries store in the terminal to have your helmets checked for proper sealing or to purchase one for your stay. The current temperature in Faysea is a lovely seventeen degrees Celsius and current forecasts put the risk of plague clouds at low. Have a nice day!”

Connie just rolled her eyes as she reached the tail end of the line of people who has been with her on the shuttle down from the _Necessitas_ proper. What had brought them all here, to this armpit of the universe planet with the constant threats of unimaginably horrible death that plague clouds offered? Hell, for that matter, why had she ever come back here? 

The line moved slowly, but soon enough she found herself walking through the carefully sealed umbilical and into the spaceport proper. It was just how she remembered it. Immaculately clean and organized, and yet bustling with a restrained sort of chaos as bodies moved through the open spaces. Well, really, open spaces was a rather relative term. On another planet the terminal might have been considered cramped, with narrow halls and low ceilings, but other planets didn't have to worry quite like A-D4P7-IV did about potential hazards just from breathing. Some planets had dangerous natural fauna, some planets had flora that couldn't be digested by humans, and some just weren't inhabitable at all, but few had anything like the plague clouds. Few planets had to have architecture that stressed being able to lock down airtight areas just like 

Which had been why her family had left here, ten years ago, with a twelve year old Connie in tow. They'd saved up the money since her birth to get her off planet, to get her somewhere save where one didn't have to wear a helmet all the time just to be safe, and how had she repaid them?

She was back in Faysea—no, let's face it, this was Rat's Nest no matter what the pamphlets liked to call the place—and for the life of her, she knew it was a good idea. 

Why was that again? 

Connie looked over her claim tickets again and looked toward the signs all over the place. More than a few directed her toward baggage claim and customs, but she knew better than that. Any of that could wait. Her paperwork had said that the driver who would take her miles and miles inland to the undercity of C2-R0N would wait for her as long as it took. Which meant there was something more important do deal with first. Purposefully she made her way to a terminal display map, checked the instructions, and planned her route to the nearest Charon Industries store.

Which, it turned out, wasn't even a few hundred yards down the hall. Not that she was all that surprised. After all, she had traveled—for free of course—with a Charon Interstellar Transports flight, this was a Charon owned spaceport, and if memory served, Charon owned at least a quarter of the interests in Faysea, whether overtly or through shell companies and off-world partnerships. Why would they even begin to consider not having a shop at every fucking terminal and never once allowing one belonging to a competitor like Mystiqual Innovations, or Hyperion Corp? 

Not, Connie supposed as she strode purposefully into the store and sorted through her paperwork, that she could really get away with getting a helmet from anyone other than Charon. Sure, they were the best, but more than that, they had paid for her. Everything from the flight to her new home to her new job, right down to the littlest detail in allotting her a budget for setting up her new home with clothes, appliances, and even her brand new helmet was all coming from Charon corporate costs. 

How could they not pamper her? They had spent most of her college career courting her and others like her. Not that there were many Adaptive ex-patriots who went to college, but there were enough that there were scholarship programs that paid their way if they did certain lines of work and agreed to return to the planet to join the business. Everything from business and law degrees to accountants, and right on down the line to people like Connie. People who had proven time and time again that there were few programmers or electronics engineers on the same level. Not the kind of people that could pave the way to new advances in helmet technology to continue giving Charon the edge in the industry. 

“Good afternoon, miss,” one of the sales associates, a young man with dark hair and green eyes that danced with amusement, smiled as he made his way over to her. “You look like you're new to the planet, and if so you've come to the right place. My name is Howard and I can help you get set up with a new...”

He trailed off abruptly as Connie extracted a goldenrod colored card from her paperwork and held it out to him between two fingers. His eyes went immediately from what she realized as hungry for a purchase to resolved and far more serious. It almost made Connie smile to see him realize that he wouldn't be getting a commission off of his sale, much less a chance to foist off expensive and superfluous extras on her. Almost. 

“Ah, a new employee,” he observed dryly as he took the offered card and examined it, his eyes going wide again for a moment before what she assumed to be his best controlled expression took over. “Oh. R &D. Uh... come with me, ma'am.”

Connie followed him silently behind a desk and watched as the man quickly brought a display up on his computer screen, which he carefully turned to face her a bit. 

“How much do you know about...” Howard started to ask, and Connie just raised a hand to still him. 

“I grew up in Armonia,” Connie answered simply, “and I'm hired to R&D. How much do you think I know about helmets? What sort of limitations are on me for this?”

He stared at her for a long moment. “Miss Tourville, you're going into R&D. My job is to set you up with a reasonable interim helmet, and you get to design one to your own specifications that will be ready for you by the time you hit Charon. Not that there is much need for helmets in Charon in an Undercity, but all employees have them anyway. So... if you'll just sit still there for a moment so I can get some scans on head size, distance between pupils and all of that, and all we need to know to fit you comfortably, right?”

All she could do was sigh and sit back and let the man do what he needed. 

* * * * * *

She checked the seals on the plan gray helmet three times before she was satisfied that all was in order and donned the thing. A simple tap to a button just behind her ear activated the displays before her fingers gently rolled the microfiber cloth down over her the upper edge of her neck and and pressed gently and quickly around the edge, activating the minor electric current that sealed the fabric to her skin and listened to the faint, barely there hum of the air system kicking in fully to seal her into the helmet. 

There were people that went crazy on Adaptive because of the helmets. They were claustrophobic to even some of the more stable minded, and until her HUD fully kicked in Connie just marveled at the darkness around her relieved only slightly by the duraplas visor, coloring her world faintly orange as a bit of light pour through it. She barely had enough time to swallow hard and realize that yes, she really had chosen to come back here, to give up the wonders of open skies and expressive faces and how amazingly beautiful people's eyes could be before the HUD came to life, filling the world around her with light and wonder. 

Strange, she'd forgotten how different this place was with a helmet. Almost the second the HUD powered on she could see the pseudo-neon lights advertising a variety of 'wonders' to be had in Faysea, which connecting rail lines to hop on for what, and there was even a mini map of the terminal present in the corner of the screen. With a sigh and a mental shrug she raised her right hand, made a tiny confirmation gesture to switch the interface into responsive mode and set about closing ad after ad while she waited for the baggage terminal to dump out her two bags—there had been no point in traveling anything other than light. 

Helmet tech had come a long way in ten years, Connie decided as she got the final ad closed and with a slight but deliberate flick of her wrist returned the helmet's systems to stable mode. For one thing, when she had been a girl you had to take out a touch sensitive plate to act as your operation center to adjust settings on the helmets. Now the passive sensors in the helmets' health monitoring functions to allow them to read small gestures for navigation of the interfaces. Of course some of the basic models still used the touch plate, but even in the temporary Connie was given the best. 

Still no movement on the carousel, and with a sigh Connie contorted her fingers slightly to disconnect her external speakers and another gesture that sort of required flicking her pinkie finger just so—she was suddenly glad she'd let Howard force a manual on her for standard command gestures—opened a voice recorder program. 

She had promised to tell her parents when she made it planet-side after all. No better time than when...

The carousel started up almost as if to spite her and Connie sighs before cutting off the recorder with a sharp gesture and pushing to her feet. It wasn't like she had much to look for, but the sooner she was out of the sharp lines and easily sealed chambers of the spaceport and on her way to Charon—not like she was ever going to call it C2-R0N, only off-worlders ever called places by assigned names—the better. She wanted to be underground, she wanted to be in her new home and be able to get the damn helmet off. She didn't want to think about selling her soul to Charon for a nice place to live and a good pay check and so they would pay for her mother's healthcare back on Veritas. 

But really, that was what she had done, wasn't it? Giving up her own future to make sure her mother has as much of one as possible. Not that she'd ever phrase it like that to her parents. They'd be disappointed, stress the idea that she was more important, that they'd given everything and then some to be poor on a world where you could see the sky with your own eyes rather than middle-class on a planet that could kill you with one gasp of unfiltered air. They had to think that she'd picked this life for herself. They had to believe that this was what she wanted. 

Connie shook the thought off as she caught sight of her luggage rolling around to her. The small wheeled case she immediately lifted to her side before scooping the other bag up. There was no small temptation to check on it immediately, but Connie knew she couldn't open it in a spaceport. Instead she slung the padded carry case of her practice blades over her shoulder and wheeled her other bag back toward the collection area where she'd seen a man holding up a name with her sign earlier. Like hell she had intended to let some driver handle her stuff, or worse, try to shuffle her off without it. 

Not that he didn't try when she found him. Connie tried to glare at the man when he reached for her bags, forgetting for half a moment that he wouldn't be able to see her expression. Well at least in the undercity she wouldn't have to relearn the complicated and massively expanded range of body language people used here. Well, she hoped so. Typically people who lived in undercities lived there all their life, or in the case of Charon should be from off planet originally, so it wouldn't take too much relearning. She hoped. Still, Connie knew that shaking her head would still be read as a dismissal, and she thought the slight lift and sag of the stranger's shoulders meant he was resigning himself to what he thought was a bad idea. It helped that he turned and walked away from her with a quiet 'follow me' and she saw no reason not to obey. 

After all, how many other Tourvilles could there be in the spaceport expecting to be driven to another city? 

Still, it took a while of trailing after the man to get to their destination, which was through another pressurized hall that eventually emptied them into an equally sealed and pressurized parking garage. The second she was in the backseat of a rather comfortable company car Connie finally let go of her bags, leaving the less important piece of luggage in the footwell before she unzipped the padded bag and smiled as she lifted the first practice blade from it's confines. 

The worst part about leaving Veritas was that Connie was never going to get to really face someone with these again. It had taken her three years of training for her to even be able to prove herself to the master swordsman she had left behind. Another one spent relearning everything from him. Another year after that to work only with wooden blades before her master had finally given her these a year back. 

Connie turned the sheathed practice weapon over and over in her hands, inspecting it carefully with her fingers and the advanced magnification of her helmet display—a nice little development, maybe they'd let her play with the programming of that software to make a smoother transition from normal view to zoom—to make sure there were no new nicks in the old wooden cases. She found nothing, sighed with relief, and unsheathed the weapon to inspect the metal. It too was still beautiful, still flawless, a stylized CT engraved on the blade. Connie carefully ran her thumb down the rounded 'edge' of the blade and smiled. It had taken so much to earn these and now...

Well, at least she didn't have to let herself fall out of practice. Maybe she wouldn't get better, but she'd find some way to make sure she didn't get worse. 

Besides, there was _no_ way the crime rates in Charon were as low as the company claimed they were in the undercity. Knowing how to protect herself would surely come in handy, even if it only meant she knew how to distract someone before running. 

She wouldn't need anything more complicated than that. After all, she was just going off to be another little mindless R &D drone. 

Life, from here on out, was almost decided for her.


	2. Chapter 2

Her new apartment was 14-C-35. Connie glared at the number even as her guide, a lower level electronics technician who had identified herself as Crystal thrust a duraplas chip into the slot by the door to prompt it to slide open. 

“Laces,” Connie grumbled as she moved past crystal and into her new home, looking around the plainly furnished entry room and into the living room further in. “I live in 'laces.'” 

The woman went utterly silent, to the point where Connie actually turned around to look at her, unsure whether or not the woman had just forgotten that she was there. What she found, though, was the woman with wide eyes glancing back and forth between Connie and the door. 

“Oh my god, it _is_!” she laughed at last, and Connie rolled her eyes in response. Of course it was. “You're originally from Adaptive aren't you? No one but the natives really seem to turn number codes into words so readily.”

“Armonia,” Connie shrugged, heading further into her new apartment to toss her bags onto the couch. “Anyway, what's coding reg here?”

“Floor number, then wing, then location number. Wings are all off of a central core on the residential levels like this, and you are a lucky person to have netted a place here in the core. That's what the 'c' is for. Core apartments are always larger. The company must be really excited to have you join us,” Crystal breezed, and Connie had to bite her lip to keep from pushing the woman bodily from the apartment. 

“Thanks,” she said instead. “I think I need some time to settle in now. My paperwork says they're giving me a few days to adjust, right? And I'll have someone show up to show me around then?”

“Of course. But if you need help before then, just grab the land line and dial 4-1-1 and we'll send someone down to help,” Crystal smiled. “In the mean time is there...”

No. Dear god no. She'd had to put up with the cheerful banter the whole way down here. Why wouldn't this woman just leave already? 

“I'm fine,” Connie answered as politely as she could manage. “I just really want a chance to lay down after all my travel, you know? There is a computer set up, right? I'm sure if I have any questions I can get them answered by e-mail.”

It was almost amazing the way the woman didn't seem to notice the fact that Connie was just short of herding her toward the door, and even more amazing the way the silence blissfully settled around her as she closed the door securely behind the woman and threw the bolt on the lock into place. That done she slid down the door with a sigh of relief. Finally, after all of her traveling, she was going to be free to just stop and sit down for a while. 

Except, she decided after a moment, not in her helmet. 

True enough to what she'd been told at the store, the second she had set foot out of the vehicle in Charon, Crystal had been there, pressing her new, custom helmet into her hands. She could have waited to don it, but right from the first glance she had been able to tell that Crystal was one of those talkative types that weren't so bad except for the fact that they babbled on endlessly and never really understood that they were doing it. Any other day she could handle such a person with aplomb, but after a five hour car rid in utter silence where the only thing Connie had been able to do to entertain herself had been recording that message to her mother and sending it off... well, yeah, she had just wanted the protection of the helmet to hide how annoyed she knew she was going to get. 

Connie brushed her thumb carefully over the seal releases on either side of her head and didn't quite moan in pleasure when she felt the microfiber seals loosen on her neck. Helmet tech had apparently come a long way. Back when her parents had been kids the seals went halfway down the neck and had a slight suction to make sure they stayed tight. Now they were almost impossible to feel. That didn't mean, though, that there wasn't something absolutely pleasing about peeling the seals loose from her neck, hitting the helmet release button to open the sections at the bottom to let it come off easier, and pull the whole contraption off. 

There were few pleasures in all the universe so great as sucking in great lungfuls of air and knowing it wasn't going to kill you. Most people took that for granted. Hell, for the better part of a decade Connie had too. But now, back here, living deep underground to keep from dying... well, that made it hit home. 

The rest of her life, consumed by the need to survive, the need to filter every last breath of air. By the limitations helmets inflicted on her. No more sunsets just for the sake of sunsets. 

Maybe that was why most people chose orange films on their helmets, Connie mused as she rested her helmet in her lap and looked down at it. She'd selected a simple model. Just a base series mark six helmet, the traditional orange film to the duraplas visor, and part of her smiled at how nice it looked next to the rich brown color of the rest of the helmet. Someone else might look at it and find the whole thing dull. Of course they had no clue how loaded out for tech this thing was, both hardware and software. She'd spent most of the tour with Crystal organizing and reorganizing menu trees, system structures and fine tuning the basic little programs she knew she would play with at some point. 

It didn't matter that she knew there would never be are reason to use the helmet. She was never leaving this place. But it was still nice to have the option. Still nice to know that if she did, if she got up and walked away, she'd be set in the most basic sense just by having this helmet. 

Maybe later, she decided, she's plug it in to the computer they provided for her and tinker a bit with coding level stuff. Or take it to the lab where they would set her up and rework some of the printed circuits to see if she couldn't just manage to make the processor run faster. 

Maybe she'd let herself keep dreaming that this thing could be an escape for her. Maybe she would just put it up on a shelf in her room so she could look on it and marvel over the dual aspects of it. Her prison as much as her potential salvation. Sunset replicated in the visor when the light caught it just right, reminding her of what freedom tasted like and how she'd never taste it again. 

No, Connie decided, pushing to her feet and clutching the helmet between her hands. No, she wouldn't torture herself like that. She deserved better than stewing in the consequences of her decisions. She was here now. She was an employee of Charon Industries. They were pampering her. Hell, her paperwork had said that all she had to do to furnish her home was go on the intranet, look up all the options, and ask for whatever she wanted. That she could just go up to the shopping levels and find new clothes to fit her new life. And in the mean time...

In the mean time Connie opened the closet near the front door and tipped the helmet carefully up onto the high shelf. 

Out of sight, out of mind.

* * * * * *

The lab wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that she was already tired of her coworkers. Not even three days on the job and Connie already wanted to throttle two of the other five R&D techs in her section. There was Rysling—what kind of name was that—who thought he was god's gift to Adaptive and yet couldn't get the improved IFF targeting systems for a military design to actually paint allies accurately about twenty percent of the time. Which wasn't as bad as Veronica, who specialized in medical suites and was developing a bioscanner override for law enforcement purposes that should tap into another helmet's health suites to evaluate the status of others, but also had an unfortunate side effect of administering a not so insubstantial electric shock to the back of the user's neck. And dear god Connie wished she could forget Rutherford, who was old, set in his ways, and assumed that everything Connie suggested was wrong because she was the newest employee in the section and he was the oldest. 

Honestly, Connie didn't want to strangle Rutherford. She just wanted to find a way to get him shifted out of the department and into something like QA. There was no place for minds that were set in their ways in this department, especially as the manager. Not that she got to have input into the whole process. Hell, she was lucky that the ass hadn't gone so far as to give her 'considerate' oversight after the first day. At least he was aware enough to pick up on her skills and just leave her with a project and let her work on it. 

Rysling and Veronica could barely handle the idea of giving Connie space to breathe.

“So, what's it like on Veritas?” Rysling asked as Connie was trying, quite hard, to focus on the rewiring of a subroutine processing node that she thought she could get more kick out of, which was the most advanced type of work Rutherford was willing to put in front of her for the moment. 

“It's like any other planet that isn't here,” Connie shrugged, brushing a few strands of hair back from her face before setting her soldering iron aside and staring at Rysling. “There's sun and sky and you don't need a helmet to be on the surface. In fact, most places don't build too much underground. They don't even have airlocks on the entrances to buildings.”

“How do they protect themselves from contaminants?” Veronica prompted, eyes wide. 

Really, there was just something weird about people who lived on Adaptive, Connie decided. Then again, it had taken her a long time to adjust to life on Veritas. To get past the idea that she didn't have to look up at clouds and be scared. And the first fog had found her family inside, terrified about how unsafe their home was. And these two, they had never lived anywhere else, so how could they know better? 

Very few people ever left Adaptive, Connie knew. It had to be just as hard for people here to adjust to the idea of another planet as it was for immigrants to adjust to the idea of the dangers of plague clouds. 

“There weren't any.”

That little tidbit probably would have prompted even more debate were it not for the fact that Rutherford finally looked over at the three of them and cleared his throat imperiously. Rysling and Veronica had the presence of mind to look chided, but Connie just met the old fogey's leveled gaze and she didn't back down. If he was going to give her make-work, then she as going to at least chit-chat with the ones who bothered to pay attention to her. Which the other two women in the research group didn't bother to. She'd been introduced to them once and then promptly ignored. 

Didn't they know she didn't have to be here? Didn't they understand that she could have done something else with her life? She hadn't had to come back to Adaptive. She hadn't had to sell her soul to Charon. She...

No, she knew that wasn't true. She'd made her bed and this was her lying down in it. Everything from Rutherford's hard looks to Rysling and Veronica hassling her, to being completely ignored by the only two in the place that seemed valuable from Connie's estimate. Who knew, maybe someday she'd do something to earn their attention, maybe even friendship. They seemed more sensible than most of the other people Connie had met before this, and sure she would have to prove herself to them, but that wasn't hard, right? 

Or would Charon bump her to another shift or another group or a team or something if she proved herself? 

There really was no knowing, was there?

Connie sighed and returned her attention to the board before her and turned her iron back on to reheat. There was work to do here. That was what she was here for: to work. To create. To put the skills she'd yet to run into a limitation on to use so that Charon could make a better product and make more money. Money that she'd see in drips and drops. Money they mostly promised to use to take care of her mother. 

And all she could do in the mean time was focus on getting her subroutine processing node to work more efficiently. She was here to do a job, a job that Charon Industries had put her through school to do. How could she hold it against them when they just wanted to get the best work possible out of their new tool? After all, she was just another investment. 

That realization almost made her grab the iron and just hurl it across the room.

* * * * * *

“Who are they?” Connie found herself whispering to Angelica, one of the aloof, senior R&D techs on her shift a week later. 

The 'they' in question were a pair of men walking through the middle of the busy streets of level eleven. Most of the people around hurried on about their daily lives, looking into shop windows or plunging headfirst into stores to buy everything from daily necessities to clothes to general frivolities—people in the undercity of Charon sure spent a lot more money on just keeping themselves entertained or amused than Connie had ever seen on the streets of Armonia but life under the surface was just different she guessed. Not that Connie could see the point to such gratuitous spending, but people in Charon seemed to find it an acceptable past time, and when Angelica had finally warmed up enough to Connie to invite her out clothes shopping because Connie's 'wardrobe just would not do'. Whatever. Connie's attention right in that moment was more caught up in the two men and how everyone else there seemed to give them wide berth. 

It was the helmets, Connie decided after a moment of watching them. No one wore helmets in the undercity other than security forces, who used them for the helpful connection to databases and software suits that Connie was finally getting to test her hand in developing. Everyone else seemed to celebrate the fact that they didn't have to wear helmets on the lower levels. Yeah, everyone knew that some clouds settled into low areas, but the protections on an undercity were extensive due to the sheer number of unhelmeted residents. A single mistake could kill untold numbers of people, and Connie shuddered to even consider that. 

Yet there were both of the men, moving through the crowd like they owned it, one in a helmet that Connie recognized from her studies as a military class CQB helmet in a base seafoam green color that suggested Faysea military, but with non-regulation cerulean trim and a few modifications that were so clear at first glance that Connie almost wondered if they were legal. The other one looked more like a bright purple dome with tusks curving around the front that were probably the air intake and filtration systems, and Connie didn't recognize it from any Charon model line or that of a competitor, which meant it was a custom job.

Nor did the strangeness of the two men end there. Most people here wore relatively normal clothes, the sorts of things Connie might have seen back on Veritas, but those two men had something more like what Connie faintly remembered from being a girl. Bright, loud styles, obvious patterns, and the kinds of combinations that screamed surface dwellers. Up there your clothes and helmets had to do what your faces couldn't. But surely it wasn't the boisterous appearance that everyone was giving wide berth to, right? Yeah, their taste was shitty, but it wasn't _that_ bad, right? 

“Don't look at them,” Angelica hissed, almost under her breath. Clearly she didn't want to draw their attention, which was weird in its own way.

“Why? Who _are_ they?”

“Mercenaries, Constance. And if they're here they're sure to have clearance to be here from the higher-ups,” Angelica whispered frantically, grabbing Connie's arm to pull her away. 

It took more self control than Connie honestly expected to keep herself from breaking the hold and moving automatically into an arm-bar. 

“Mercenaries?”

“For someone from Armonia you really don't know very much, do you?” Angelica answered, hauling Connie further up the street and consequentially—likely deliberately—further away from the strange men.

“I was only there until I was about ten, and my parents had a very strict home school policy because we didn't live in the best neighborhood while they were saving up to get us off planet,” Connie shrugged. “I didn't know mercenaries walked around so openly in Charon.”

“Charon?” Angelica laughed quietly. “You're kidding, right? Adaptive is practically one of the worst places in the universe for them. We teem with them. It's a lucrative business here, like helmets. Geez, didn't your parents teach you planetary history when you were a kid?”

“They didn't see it as necessary seeing as we were moving offworld,” Connie admitted nervously. Great, the one time she found herself without some useful tidbit of knowledge to placate one of her coworkers, and it apparently had to be over a sensitive topic. 

“Okay, so you got mercs through Veritas, right? People who contracted questionably legal things?”

“I think so.”

“Well, on Adaptive, they're common. And when you see them, you stay the hell out of the way. Because they aren't good people, Constance. The kind of people that get into that sort of life would slit their own mothers' throats for credit.”

But, Connie decided as she looked back over her shoulder at the retreating forms, there was also something else about them that she didn't think Angelica could see. 

The way those men moved, the way the people parted for him, the way they didn't seem to notice anyone around them and everyone seemed to notice them...

They were like plague clouds. Rolling through the landscape. The only choice other people had was to move out of the way or fall before them. 

And if that wasn't freedom, Connie didn't know what was.


	3. Chapter 3

It took less than a month to find and get into the deep-net message boards. Which, in the grand scheme of things was relatively fast. After all, going out of the archived and collated constraints of any world's basic extranet system was never a simple thing. Hell, it was easier to piggyback messages into the comm feeds of a planet-side shuttle for transmission to the mothership and eventual dispersal into the active extranet of another planet than it could be to find your way into the dark abyss of a true deep-net. 

And there was no doubt that what Adaptive had was an active and rich deep-net system. But coding the spiders to dig down to that level, to find the things out of the beaten path, had taken a while. To the point where she had actually, a half a week in, decommissioned the old ones she used back on Veritas which she had only tweaked slightly, and built a whole new set of them from the ground up. The returns were still slow, but when one returned an encoded site with no information other than a simple riddle, well, she knew she'd hit the jackpot. 

_Speak, friend, and enter._

A line from a practically ancient classical fantasy series, which had been a riddle in and of itself. Just the sort of nerdy touch that tended to herald a conclave of hackers of a certain sort. Not the people she was looking for, but definitely ones that would be able to point her in the right direction. 

The protections on the forums were simple, and Connie left a cracking program running quietly in the background on her computer as she went off to work that day. It probably would have even done its work in the course of her regular nine hour shift, but she found herself forced to hand it another three while she corrected a glaring error in the code on Rysling's IFF program to finally have that thing polished and ready for full testing, and that had come on top of her own deadline for finishing a new piece of software that she hoped would improve trajectory mapping on military and security level helmet battle suites. 

As it was by the time she got back that night it was late, she was tired, and the microwaved dinner was her only companion other than blaring music as she entered the hacker's forum and started rooting around for the information she needed. She culled the proper terminology by combing through combinations. She taught herself which people to ignore and which to seek out conversations with. She figured out who was most and least likely to point her in the right direction. And when she was ready, she cued up a few carefully coded spambots she'd prepared earlier and let them loose on the forum to do her work while she showered and headed off for bed. 

Sure enough she had directions where to look when she woke in the morning, and a new puzzle, far harder than the last, to face off against when she had some free time. 

No matter what it took, Connie resolved as she returned to her desk later that evening, she was going to find her way into what someone on the hacker forums had referred to as Tartarus. The name was pompous on so many levels, but given the terrible taste in clothing she'd seen on the mercenaries when shopping with Angelica that time... well, Connie wasn't surprised that she found the people claiming to be mercs on these boards to have chosen such a poor name for this place. 

Or, more often than not, for themselves. Seriously, who went by the name 'the Equalizer'? 

Still, it was the closest she'd gotten to learning just what was going on here on Adaptive so far, and she had to content herself with that. After all, no one else seemed willing to talk to her about the subject. What choice did she have but to go to the horse's mouth, as it were. At least shemight learn something, might find something that helped her get through the tedium of daily life. 

And speaking of tedium...

Constance pushed away from her desk when she heard a chime ring through her home, turning off the monitor as she did so. Why in the world had she agreed to this stupid hosting a book club in her own damn apartment? Why had she let Angelica and Katherine talk her into the idea that sitting around claiming to have read mindless drivel and sharing wine and cheese was something she wanted to do with her down time? Why hadn't she just spent what little free money she had on buying a game system of some sort, and her free time maybe on practicing with her blades?

No, she had to go and do something as stupid as trying to make friends with people who thought reading trashy books and discussing them in high brow tones really meant something about who they were. 

“Coming!” Connie yelled as she grabbed her favorite sweater and tugged it on as she shuffled through the apartment to the door. She'd have to grab the wine from the kitchen, but she'd already opened it to let it breathe so she could start getting drunk right away, and she'd seen to cutting cheese into little cubes, and the other little finger snacks were all ready to pop into the oven or pull from the fridge and...

Honestly, she hadn't been expecting to find a stranger at her door. Katherine and Angelica yes, but not the slightly taller blond woman with brilliant green eyes behind them. 

“Constance!” Katherine greeted her cheerfully, moving in to hug Connie and kiss her cheeks. Connie mimicked the gesture rather than pushing her away, because she had to try and fit in here. Just why, oh why, couldn't she have ended up with stereotypical programming and engineering nerds rather than these women who were breaking the model and breaking Connie's head with expectations that she didn't even know how to begin to fulfill. 

“I hope you don't mind, but we brought a friend,” Angelica smiled, tucking a lock of currently purple hair back over her ear.—seriously why did these women dye their hair such gaudy shades, were they just trying to make up for the lack of helmets because she knew the two of them were originally from surface cities. “Constance, this is Charlotte. She's a new hire in the accounting department and just moved in up the block from me. When I told her I had a book club meeting tonight, well, I just couldn't say no to that bright face.”

No, Connie decided as she moved aside to welcome Kathleen and Angelica in. She could understand why that was, even if the other women didn't. There was something about the way this Charlotte's eyes moved to evaluate Connie's apartment. In the way that her pants fit her loose enough not to constrict but tight enough to keep from bunching up uncomfortably. Something about the fluid motion when Charlotte extended her arm so Connie could shake her hand. Something about this woman that screamed predator to Connie's trained perception, down to the littlest detail. 

Whatever else Charlotte was, she wasn't simply an accountant. 

* * * * * *

_Name: Charlotte Charleston. Age: twenty-six. Hair: blonde. Eyes: green. Occupation: accountant, pay grade C-5._

Connie sighed as her eyes slowly took in the personnel file, and for the life of her, she wished she had some of that wine left over. Surely the taste of the far too sweet wine would wipe the bitter taste of adrenaline from her mouth. There was just something about that Charlotte that was bothering Connie. For one thing, there were no notes in the file that intimated anything about a former military background, or martial arts training, or anything else like that. Maybe Connie didn't know exactly what style she had spent all of the painfully long two hours of book club picking up from the woman, but she knew someone who knew how to fight when she saw them. Too much of her training with her master had covered recognizing threats for Charlotte not to set off about twenty kinds of alarms. 

That and there were faint, hard to see scars across the backs of her hands and over her fingers. Connie knew those kinds of marks. Saw them faintly on her own skin. Those were the hands of someone who trained with knives to degree. You always managed to cut yourself a few times when learning. And, again, the file did nothing to explain away that little detail. 

Book club had been strange to say the absolute least. Charlotte had sat back on the couch, the same place Connie always chose for it meant she always had not only her back to a wall, but a commanding view of every entrance to the room. The woman hadn't flinched when Connie had sat down on the other end of the couch, but she hadn't entirely relaxed until Connie had curled her legs up under herself, effectively hampering her own movement. Her eyes had darted around the small apartment, she always looked up when someone left or returned, and the whole time anyone held anything that could be remotely construed as a weapon, her attention was on them. 

Connie didn't know what to do with that information. 

Honestly, Connie didn't know what to do with the idea of Charlotte Charleston in the slightest. So she'd done the next best thing to cornering the woman and demanding answers—which she had a bad feeling would have ended up getting her hurt—she looked for what information there already was. 

Strangely it was almost easier to hack into the Charon Industries personnel files than it really should have been. Maybe Charon was just too used to the idea of the absolute loyalty that its employees seemed to possess toward the company. No, maybe loyalty wasn't the right word. Devotion was probably a better term. People here owed their livelihood, their safety, and their health to Charon. No one would dare cross that, right? Still, they were a major corporation with interests on and off planet, with serious competitors in a multibillion dollar industry on Adaptive alone. Surely that should mean there should be a better level of electronic security just to prevent corporate espionage, or the very thought of it. Yet there were Connie's little bots, picking their way easily into the Human Resources files and returning this. 

Of course it wasn't like she'd learned much of anything from the file. It was clean. As clean as it could be really. Clean and bland and somehow enticing all the same. Like...

No, that wasn't possible, was it? 

Could it be that Charlotte Charleston wasn't real? The record was almost too good to be true. But no, it wasn't like Connie could be sure of that, right? She didn't know this woman, and she had to assume that the background checks Charon ran were top of the line. There was no way that there was a spy, or even, just maybe, a merc infiltrating Charon, right? 

No. It wasn't possible. She was sure of that. 

And yet there was something about her that made Connie stay up late, well past her normal bedtime and far past when the wine started to make her head dizzy, as she coded her bots for a new task. To sit quietly in the Charon systems, looking for any tidbits related to Charlotte. Any logs using her employee identification number. And, just to cover her bases, to monitor the work that Charlotte did during business hours. 

She wouldn't turn up anything. Nothing at all. Connie knew that. She considered it an academic exercise. Bots programmed and left to themselves, she shuffled off for a brief shower and from there to collapse into bed. Tartarus could wait until tomorrow evening. For now she had a closer, more interesting puzzle to play with. A puzzle in the form of a blonde woman with impossibly green eyes and little scars and the mannerisms of a fighter. A puzzle named Charlotte. 

Connie was unconscious within moments of her head hitting the pillow. 

She wouldn't know for days about the attack program her search bots managed to provoke. Wouldn't pick up on the tracking programs in her computer for a while. Wouldn't know that her own actions brought attention to Charlotte. She was out cold and couldn't see the warnings that flashed across her computer as the other viruses tore through her computer before setting it back to rights as if nothing had happened at all.


	4. Chapter 4

There was a man repainting the hall Connie's apartment was in. 

Another time she might not have been suspicious of that. Another time she might have just brushed it off, but this wasn't another time. This was book club day, which meant Charlotte was going to be here. The week before there had been someone in the halls working on replacing lights. The week before that three apartments down had been throwing some sort of party and there had been people in and out all night. 

Once she would have brushed off. 

Twice she could have overlooked. 

Three times and Connie's intrigue in Charlotte was only growing. None of her bugs had managed to pull up anything new about the woman. Of course her deeper searches also had failed to find the existence of Charlotte Charleston outside of her perfectly cultivated file. Because cultivated really was the right word for it. It felt deliberately shaped, guided, pruned, and not natural and a little lopsided here or there with some extraneous detail like normal resumes and personnel files seemed to be. It felt too clean, felt too perfect, felt too scripted.

Just like Charlotte.

Charming, sweet, kind Charlotte who stayed after Angelica and Kathleen left to help Connie clean up. Intelligent, well spoken Charlotte who never read the book but waited and listened long enough that she came into the conversations with relevant and thoughtful points. Strong, agile Charlotte that caught a wine bottle almost before Connie knocked it off of the table. Dangerous, predatory Charlotte that moved with a warriors' self-assured grace and awareness of her surroundings and made Connie want to throw something at her just to test her reflexes. 

Charlotte Charleston was a mystery that Connie could not get to the bottom of.

* * * * * *

Sleep didn't come that night. The painter in the hall, the tension in Charlotte's shoulders, the strange thrum of energy in the apartment during the whole meeting had Connie tense in a way that she couldn't explain. 

Sleep didn't come that night like it had any of the others. No, that night she sent out her probes like she always did, stretched out on her bed, and couldn't even close her eyes, much less sleep. So when there was a flash of red as her programs were intercepted like they had been countless times before, she saw it. 

Saw it and was out of bed like a flash, and even then she barely saw the warning from her system before it was gone.

It added up. 

Dear god did things suddenly add up. 

Slowed computer response times. Delays when she was working on coding her network crawlers. The utter lack of return on information about Charlotte. 

She'd tripped a wire somewhere. Somewhere, somehow, some when she had messed up royally and if Charon didn't know that Charlotte had been suspicious before, they might now, and they definitely knew Connie wasn't up to any good. 

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!

It took nearly a day and a half straight of code work to partition and comb through all of the files on her computer, searching for the virus root and branch. Rutherford called, twice. At least, Connie thought he did. She didn't move from her computer except for quick bathroom breaks. There was too much risk to be had in leaving the virus to breed and spread through her system once more. 

That done she unplugged her computer from the wall to keep it safe, then pulled the power supply from the system itself just to be sure, before she collapsed onto her bed and spent another day recuperating. 

Going in to work the next day was nearly impossible. Sit around, hurry to do nothing. Wait to see if someone would come for her. Keep her ear to the ground and listen to Kathleen and Angelica and pray for any tidbit of news that would tell her if Charlotte, whoever she was, was still there. Was still alive. Was safe. And even with the name dropped in reference to lunch the day before, Connie still wasn't entirely sure that things were going well. Couldn't be. She wanted nothing more than to be back with her computer. 

When asked she dismissed her absence as food poisoning from something she cooked herself for lunch before book club, and no one questioned her. Still, when Connie made her way back to her apartment she couldn't help but watch people around her nervously. Couldn't keep herself from flinching at loud noises. She must have screamed suspicious activity or lack of sleep or just something, but at last she made it back and then she was a blur of activity again. 

Hacking, most movies failed to point out, was slow and boring to look at. Connie had never really thought it was glamorous. No, she'd gotten into it because of her interest in computers, programming, and other odds and ends. She'd stayed because in college a friend of hers had been forced to deal with an abuse ex-boyfriend who threatened to release nude photos of her to the whole school. Connie had not only managed to delete all traces of the images, but even overclock his laptop in such a way that she heard the thing pretty much slagged itself. So she'd kept doing it. Kept trying. Kept going until she wound up here. 

Wound up deep enough to find something terrifying marked. 

A kill order on employee 133-3584-317-46. 

A contract, half paid already, offered to a mercenary called nothing more than Flowers. 

Which, Connie supposed, explained the increased attention on Charlotte. Someone wanted her dead, and was making sure they knew everything they could about her first. Or...

Or maybe they'd decided Connie was an accomplice or close friend or something. 

Fuck.

What was she supposed to do about this?

She started and deleted four emails. Found out Charlotte's apartment number and stopped herself from going there. Dug up Charlotte's personal comm number, and didn't call. 

So many ways she could step in, most of which she was certain would get her killed. She should just step back and hope that the contract wasn't on two heads. That they wouldn't come after her when the time came. 

Sit back and try not to think about how not acting was pretty much the same as condoning the action.

* * * * * *

Tartarus. 

The name came back to Connie two days after she found out about the contracted hit. 

Mercenaries, grouped together in one place. 

Maybe she could find this Flowers. Maybe she could find someone else local who she could pay to get Charlotte away safely. Maybe if she dug deep enough she could find an answer, find an escape to the hole she'd dug for herself. That was all she needed, right? Some way to get Charlotte away safe so that she could go back to her old life. 

Back to Rysling and Veronica bothering her about what it's like to be from off-planet. Back to book club meetings with Kathleen and Angelica. Back to Rutherford's disdainful glances and endless projects of questionable purpose or desirability. Who actually thought the security forces of any city actually should have access to the ability to taze someone using their helmet thanks to that terrible failure of programming Veronica had created? Was that even remotely ethical?

Was standing back and not telling someone that their life was in danger any better?

Still, Tartarus presented its own problem. A level of protections that Connie hadn't tried her hand at yet, not in her obsession with the green eyed women with a predator's presence. Could she actually break through it in enough time to figure out how to convince someone to help her? 

Did she even want to be helped?

All she could do, Connie decided at last, was to try. 

Surprisingly, Tartarus took less effort to get into than the previous forum. Not that it was easier. No, the encryptions were harder almost by an order of magnitude. But the last time Connie had gone up against one of these systems had been before she had found herself elbows deep in the inner workings of Charon's computer systems. 

Next to that, how could this be anything at all? 

When she posted her first message she was laughed at. 

The second turned into a debate as to whether or not the Flowers really even existed, with one person assuring Connie that he wasn't really hired if a flower hadn't shown up to warn his victim, because that was the merc's style. 

The third was shut down almost immediately by the moderators, reopened just as quickly by Connie once she grabbed herself the status through some careful work—really this forum was really insecure for the deep net. 

The fourth...

The fourth was on its way toward being another tedious bit of debate that completely shunted aside her point until someone going by the name 'Number One' sent Connie a private message. Gave her a glimmer of hope. 

_Matters involving the Flowers tend to be tricky to talk about._

Connie stared at the message and bit her lip. Was this a legitimate offering to discuss her issue, or was it something else entirely? 

No, she had to try. Charlotte's life hung in the balance, and that had to count for something, right? 

_No one is taking me seriously,_ she responded, trying to get the wording perfect in her head before she typed. _I've seen the invoice. The assholes here managed to work offing one of my co-workers into the cost of operation!_

_That... actually sounds like something that would amuse his kind,_ Number One responded almost immediately. _And also something that most places on Adaptive aren't willing to risk. While mercenary work isn't always illegal, it is highly frowned upon. Such an open attempt is quite brazen._

_It wasn't open. It's buried so deep in the files here under such heavy protections that I'm surprised I got to it. But they're going to kill her. The first payment has already been transferred. Almost a week ago._

_Then I doubt your co-worker has more than a day or two to live,_ Number One responded. 

Connie stared at the flashing cursor of her reply box. It couldn't be over this quickly. This easily. She'd tried. Dammit she had tried, hadn't that counted for anything? 

_Unless, of course, you're in a hard to reach location. From what I hear whispered, Flowers is based on the Algos continent, so if you and your friend are elsewhere, that would buy you some time._

_We're on Lupe, but I don't want to buy time. I want to get her out of here so she'll be safe._

_No one is safe when Flowers is after them but... Well, if you're okay with trusting me, maybe I can help you out a bit. Where are you and what is your friend called? And please, if you've already got him after your friend and he's already been paid by someone in the company you work for, then he'll know where they are. So let's pretend we've done plenty of posturing and sensing each other out and just cut to the point._

Connie could feel herself worrying at her lip. It was a habit she had picked up in college and she had never really been able to break when she was truly worried. There was a chance that this, like so many other things lately, was just another trap. Something that would get Charlotte killed faster. Something that would get her killed as well. 

But, well, as they said on Veritas, once your hat was in the ring, you might as well win. 

_Her name is Charlotte Charleston and she works as an accountant for Charon Industries in their undercity._

_I'll see if I can't do something for her. And for you. But if I'm going to do that, I'm going to need to know who you are as well._

Once your hat was in the ring, Connie reminded herself. 

But, that didn't mean she had to play all her cards. 

_You can call me CT._


	5. Chapter 5

Be ready. 

That was what Number One had warned her multiple times over the last week. Their conversations had grown longer, more involved, more detail oriented. Number One had offered Connie advice on what to do if the metaphorical shit hit the fan. In return Connie offered Number One as much of the layout of the parts of C2-R0N as she could come up with. Connie worked on carefully walking the halls she had access to, finding excuses to go places to measure, and trying to create as detailed of schematics as she could so that if Number One really could get there to help, there would be some paths she could take. 

The problem was that there was no amount of planning that could account for the fact that there was no way to know when or where she would be when she needed to act. Or that she'd have any sort of heads up regarding whether or not she even needed to. 

Her life was a time bomb waiting to explode, and Connie didn't have the faintest clue as to what she would do when it really happened. The most serious fights she'd ever been in were under controlled circumstances with her master and other students. There was a pretty substantial chance that when the moment came she would freeze. That she would die because she would hesitate. That she would need to protect herself and not be willing or able to land a blow that would not only take another person's life, but save her own. 

How did you keep going from day to day with that hanging over your head?

* * * * * *

Her comm went off in the middle of the work day a week and two days after she first spoke with Number One. Connie found herself in the middle of testing a line of code for a pet project of hers, a way for helmets with higher energy reserves to allow them to allow for a brief holographic projection. Not that she knew what what she wanted to do with the program in the long run, and she wasn't logging it into the Charon Industries systems, but there was something there if she could just figure out what to do with it.

One of the rules of working in R&D was that you didn't interrupt the work day for personal calls. Even taking the comm pad out would get her in trouble with Rutherford. She had to balance the risk of the trouble she'd get into if she pulled the comm out against the chance it was Number One giving her the order to run. 

She had to choose, and Connie erred on the side of the world being falling in around her head. 

_Get to Charlotte now. -#1_

“Constance, would that be...” 

She didn't even bother to look at Rutherford. Connie just pushed back from her work station and started to gather her things. Her hands froze over the light coat she had selected that morning. What did it matter? There wasn't time to worry over something so small. No. Number One had made two things clear: get armed, and get to Charlotte as quickly as possible. 

“Constance, are you even listening to me?”

Armed. Right, that would be a harder prospect than she really liked. If she had been lucky enough to get the news in her apartment she could have grabbed her blades. Even without a real edge to speak of they would be more useful than just some mop handle or something. But there wasn't a chance for that to happen. Going back for them was far past stupid. 

There was a length of metal pipe on Rysling's desk. To be honest, Connie couldn't even begin to understand just what he needed it for. But it was long, approaching the length of one of her blades, and she knew from experience that it was strong enough to stand up to some beating. So instead of answering Rutherford she pushed past him, snatched the length of pipe up, twirled it between the fingers of her left hand to test the weight. Not perfect, but she was sure she could make good use of it. 

“Hey!” Rysling protested and “Constance!” Rutherford yelled. 

“Sorry, guys, but I've got something a _tad_ more important than this to work on,” she said, and frankly she was amazed by how calm her voice was. 

Until, of course, she saw Rutherford start moving toward the button that summoned security to their work room. Well, that was something just couldn't have, now wasn't it. 

“Sorry to do this to you, Ruff, but I can't let you do that,” Connie sighed, snatching a screwdriver off of Rysling's desk and throwing it at him. 

The throw was better than anything she could have planned for, and Connie watched as the shaft of the screwdriver pierced into her supervisor's shoulder. There was blood. Almost immediately there was blood, welling up around the shaft, into Rutherford's shirt, spreading slowly. Were it not for the fact that all of the eyes in the room were on her before, Connie was certain they would have been on her now. As it was she just spun the pipe through her fingers again and made straight for the door. 

On the way out her eyes fell on the military grade helmet that Angelica had been testing a new threat analysis program in. It was a a plain brown thing, and instead of a full visor there was only duraplas in the shape of eyes over an enhanced filtration system. It looked more like an actual head for all of the reduced visual area, but Connie knew from talking with the others that there was still a full display inside that operated on micro-cameras all over the helmet. 

She would need something if she actually survived to get out of here. Granted so would Charlotte. But for now, well, Connie just grabbed the thing on her way out and quickly slid it over her head, and even as she shifted her grip along the pipe her free hand ran her fingers along the microfiber seal and booted up the full display system. 

Time to move. 

* * * * * *

Connie had never been to the HR department. Granted getting there wasn't too difficult on a normal day. Any other day the trip from her research area on level four down to the human resources area on level five would have been no concern at all. Today she had just thrown a screwdriver into her supervisor's shoulder, she'd stolen a helmet prototype, she'd grabbed what no one could mistake as anything but intended to be a weapon, and now she was running through the halls full tilt. 

Getting to the elevator hadn't been too bad. She actually managed to make one of them before alarms started to scream openly through the complex. 

Unsurprisingly the security guard by the elevator put together the woman with a long pipe, fully helmeted, and running right for him, was probably the cause of the alarm. His gun came up as Connie lunged forward, spinning the pipe into a reverse hold. She slammed it across he jaw even as his gun went off and she wanted to scream at the sudden burning pain across her arm. The guard was down and Connie kept going forward, jabbing at the summon button while she tried to ignore the searing pain on her right arm. 

The second the doors closed behind her Connie almost dropped the pipe. There had never been a pain like this before, she was certain of that. Nothing could hurt nearly so bad as that hurt right then and there. It was almost enough to make her fall over and stop right there. 

Instead Connie took a deep breath, reached down, and started tearing at the edge of her shirt even as her helmet started feeding her updated information on her status. Pulse rate up, losing blood, adrenaline levels elevated. No fucking shit. It was easier than she expected to rip a long strip from around the base of her shirt, and a bit harder to wrap it firmly around the bleeding wound. Her helmet told her it was minor, really just a graze, but god did it hurt, and there was just blood.

She could have died, Connie realized as she struggled to knot the fabric securely in place. Somehow she managed both before the elevator gave a cheery little chime to announce she'd arrived on a new floor. Quickly Connie scooped up the length of pipe again and ducked to the side of the elevator, protecting herself for when it opened. 

Even as it opened there was the sound of shouting voices. Great. Well, she couldn't get lucky, could she? She had to get around the corner and head down the hall, around another corner and to Charlotte's office, and all without dying. And that was only the first step. After that... After that she had to try and get them out, hope that Number One really was here, and run. 

Connie calmed herself with a deep breath, listened to the men approaching the elevator. Waited until she thought they were close enough, and then she moved again. Threw herself around the corner, pipe coming up to smash across the face of one of them before she whirled quickly to bring the length of the pipe hard into the gut of the second. When that man doubled over Connie quickly raise her injured arm and brought the blade of her hand down hard on the back of the man's neck. They both fell and Connie didn't look back as she kept running. 

Down the hall and Connie pressed herself up against the wall just short of the corner she had to turn, fingers quickly flicking through command options on the military helmet. Set her motion trackers. Set proximity alarms. Activate IFF protocols with orders to paint all targets unless otherwise indicated as enemies. That done she looked quickly around the corner and cursed at the sight she saw. 

There were a lot of things in Connie's life, she mused, that fell firmly into the category of 'well, how the fuck did that happen?' Top of that list was typically reserved these days for the question of 'how the hell did I end up on Adaptive again,' though at the moment she found that question nowhere near as pressing as 'why the fuck am I in this hallway with nothing but a long metal pipe' and 'how the hell am I getting out of here alive?'

But taking the time to analyze that would detract from where she found herself and what she was doing. 

In that moment she was hiding just around the corner from three men with fully automatic assault rifles. In that moment she was wearing a stolen, military grade helmet, gritting her teeth against the discomfort of blood oozing slowly down her arm from below a hasty bandage made from a strip of her shirt. In that moment she was waiting for the right time to strike as the men advanced down the hall toward her, clued in by her quick peek around the corner. 

How in the fuck was she supposed to handle that? 

Connie sighed and leaned back against the wall, banged the helmet back lightly because wow how in the fuck was this supposed to...

An warning came up on her helmet. It had immediately gone to interface with the safety systems around her, of course it had. But the warning that had come up gave Connie the best idea ever. She smiled as she turned her attention to the side and her visual feed showed her the red framed cabinet beside her. That... would be perfect. 

She let the pipe slide down in her grip, turned her head aside mostly because instinct said she should. The pipe came up and slammed it into the glass of the case. She could hear people talking down the hall, but there was no time to deal with that right now. The pipe came up again, knocking more glass free, before Connie reached in and pulled the extinguisher hose free of the cabinet, flicked the activation switch in the case, and moved back toward the corner. Now she just needed the right moment to act. 

Connie carefully threaded her pipe through the belt loop of her pants, braced herself against the wall, and listened to feet approaching her. It was hard not to laugh at the readouts from the helmet, which were telling her how close the guards or whatever were coming. Damn thing was outfitted with the prototype software that attempted to calculate the distance of enemies by comparing schematics to sounds of movement. The distance estimate kept counting down and Connie's smile only grew. 

Counting down, counting down, counting down. Move. 

She could feel the insane grin she wore as she whirled around the corner, throwing the control valve on the hose to full force. Her laughter carried through the halls as the men shouted in shock at the rapidly expanding, flame-retardant foam that was spraying down the hall at them. Not that she stopped in the middle of the hall to continue hosing them. No, Connie shot on the go as she darted across the hall, giggling to herself once she was on the other side, back behind cover. A quick movement had the valve closed again, then the pipe was out again and she was moving. 

They were covered, head to to, in rapidly stiffening foam, and Connie couldn't stop laughing as she threw herself at them. Maybe it was hysteria finally taking over. Maybe it was the absolutely ridiculous image that the three men presented, throwing the useless weapons aside and shifting between slipping on the foam on the floor, trying to move limbs that were trapped in the foam, or just banging into each other. 

Where they fumbled, she was smooth and confident. Any earlier questions as to whether or not she was capable of this melted as Connie found her body moving. No, not moving. Flowing was a better word for it. Stepping easily between and amongst them while the men were still boggling. Pipe flashing out left and right. Strike hard to the back of the knee to collapse one, slide the pipe back up her hand as she twisted around to jab the end of it up into the gut of the second, doubling him over as he was winded, finish the spin as her grip slid down the pipe again, ending with her at the side of the corridor, swinging the pipe full force across the back of the third head. Well, helmet really, but that was more than enough. She could feel him go down. 

Of course that was still two relatively up, and her weapon down at her side. An easy matter to just spin her right leg up and bring the heel down in the middle of the back of the second guard in a strong ax kick. . While he fell Connie moved forward, rolling over his back in what could have been a spinning heel kick but her master would have had some better word for. Then she was back on her feet and there were three bodies on the ground. Connie just smiled and turned to run down the hall. 

A minute and a half, her HUD informed her, for the whole thing, and the way her blood sang over what she'd accomplished was almost heady. 

When Connie slid to a stop in front of Charlotte's door the laughter was gone, torn from her with her breath, leaving a dull ache in her chest as she looked at the slowly growing pool of blood on the floor. 

“No,” she found herself gasp, hand coming up to cover her mouth, blocked by the helmet. 

No. No, this wasn't. This couldn't be...

She stumbled forward a few steps into the room. Stared at the body slumped over the desk. Blonde hair reddened by blood. She had to guess it was a bullet that had torn the back of that head so open, left the face in ruins. High caliber. A woman slumped over a computer with a screen that was splattered with blood, just like the keyboard. Dear god. She... she was too late. 

She was going to be sick. Her fingers were tearing at the seal of her helmet. It had to be off, it had to be off now. Dear god she was going to be sick. She'd made it all this way, only to be too late. All of those people she'd hurt, that she'd... and it was for nothing. Charlotte was there, dead. Blood dripped over the edge of the desk, perfect red bead by perfect red bead, before splashing down into a lake of spilled life. 

Was this what it felt like, to watch someone you cared about die? 

No, it couldn't be. She hadn't known Charlotte. Hadn't cared. Couldn't...

“Move!” 

The voice tore through the hall and Connie didn't think, just reacted, ducking into the room, behind the door frame, looking for cover. She ignored the body, so close by, so impossibly far away, as the sound of gunfire tore through the hall. Ducked down and covered her head as bullet holes erupted through the nearby walls, through the door itself, struck the corpse and made it jump in a ghastly way that just made her sick all over again. 

The gunfire died down with a long, drawn out groan, and Connie just crouched there, shaking uncontrollably as she stared at the bloody body before her. She had worked so hard, she'd done so much, and in the end there was Charlotte, dead. Here she was, paralyzed, knowing she was going to be next. 

“Hey.”

The voice was the same one that had called for movement. Probably hadn't meant to save Connie. Probably...

Connie's head turned, and she found her gaze met with that of another helmet, a lightish-blue with hints of green. The visor was limited, and with the way the person's—the woman's a quick glance assured her—head tilted down to look at her, it looked angry. It wasn't a design Connie had ever seen before, which marked it as a custom job, and dear god was she really latching on to helmet designs to keep herself sane. 

“Number One?” Connie heard her own voice whisper. She couldn't think of anyone other than a mercenary that would wear such violently loud clothing, carry themselves with such confidence, or look utterly unruffled by the shooting that Connie had just heard. 

“Yeah. Come on, CT. We've got to get you out of here.” 

Connie let the woman take her hand, pull her to her feet. Her mind was elsewhere. With more than one word won from the woman's mouth, with her standing and moving and Connie looking at her... There was something familiar here. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. 

“I... didn't get here soon enough to save her,” Connie said, her voice carrying on while her brain scrambled to catch up. “I tried and...”

She watched Number One's gaze turn toward Charlotte's body, stare at it impassively. Really that shouldn't be a shock. This woman was a mercenary, crazy as she clearly was to break into Charon Industry's private undercity for the sake of a single woman, and to face against an assassin of the caliber that Connie had found hinted at being associated with Flowers. 

“So _that's_ why you're so out of it,” the woman answered, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was wondering what would turn the woman that left the trail of unconscious guards I saw into a whimpering heap.”

“She's why I even did this!” Connie protested. “I'm the one that got her in trouble in the first place! I just... There was something wrong about her and I drew their attention to it.”

“Wrong how?”

“It... She... The way she moved,” Connie provided after a moment, frustrated. How could this woman be unaffected by this? Had she no heart? “She had a lot of martial arts training. I could see it in the way she held herself. Situational awareness like you get in that too, the way she controlled her environment. I went looking into her files and there was no record of that. I triggered something and didn't even...”

The way Number One's shoulders shook, and if Connie had to guess why, she would have to say it was laughter. That was the only way she could process the noise coming from the helmet. But that made no sense at all. 

“I'll keep that in mind next time I work up a cover story. But you should keep your nose to yourself,” Number One laughed. “You're lucky I'm not going to kill you for blowing months of set-up work.”

“Months of... What?!” Connie demanded. “You... What!?”

Number One turned back to her, thrusting her hand out at Connie. “Nice to see you again, Constance. But I promise you, the woman lying there isn't Charlotte Charleston. There _is_ no Charlotte Charleston. Just me. Just Carolina.”

All Connie could do was stare. 

She might have done it for longer were it not for the fact that there was the sound of boots pounding down the hall. 

“Fuck, they're here,” Number One, or Charlotte, or Carolina, or whoever, sighed. “Fuck. I wanted to meet here because I didn't expect them to move on me this fast. Flowers was kind enough to let me call in a favor and I already owe him a _lot_ extra for him backing out of this job, but I wasn't expecting Charon to have a backup merc on this. And now we've got to move.”

“Backup merc?” Connie parroted back as she watched Carolina shrug a black bag off of her shoulder. The fact that it was familiar didn't really process until it was in her hands. Soft black material, padded under her fingers. The weight... “My blades?”

“Hope you don't mind. I stole them from your place last night and put an edge on them,” the woman responded, lifting an assault rifle from her side and bracing on the side of the door. “Figure you don't know how to use a gun, and we still have to get out of here.”

“How did you know that...?”

“You're not the only one who can recognized a trained fighter when you see them,” Number One chuckles. “Now come on, if we're going to get out here, we've got to move.” 

Connie frowned and dragged first one blade then the other from the bag. She quickly looped the strap on one blade over her shoulder before taking the other in her hands and carefully sliding it out of the sheathe. Raised the blade to her eyes and sighted down the length. Whoever this woman really was, she was at least good enough that putting an edge on the blade hadn't ruined it. Connie frowned and pulled her already ruined shirt away from her skin and slid the blade along it, marveling at how easily the fabric parted before the edge. It was a fine edge. 

“Charlotte?” Connie asked softly. 

“Carolina,” the woman insisted. “Call me Carolina. Seeing as we're close to getting each other killed, it seems fair.”

“What in the world is going on?”

“We've both managed to piss off Charon Industries, they want us dead, Flowers covered my ass killing what was probably a Control Mercenary who was likely looking for me, and if we don't get up to the surface in the next... hour, we're as good as dead because our ride isn't going to wait forever,” Carolina sighed. “Now are you with me, CT, or not?”

Connie drew her second blade, took a deep breath and nodded. 

“You're the boss.”

“Good. Switch to comm freq 723-Whiskey. We're going to need to stay in contact and that won't be easy. Paint me ally, all others foe, and get ready to move on my mark. Sync?”

Connie moved both blades to one hand and with a few quick gestures had the IFF reprogrammed, the comm frequency set, and set up an operation clock. 

“Sync.”

“Mark!”

* * * * * *

“Who's the baggage?” 

For the life of her Connie couldn't remember much between moving from the office in a blur of steel and gunfire and the start of the dead sprint for the jeep she had thrown herself into the back seat of. There was something about an elevator, and bodies and her blades were covered with blood. A small bit in the back of her head was rolling over and through faces of men and women she had cut down on her way out, in her struggle to survive. She remembered the ones she knocked out as much as the ones that lay bleeding behind her. She remembered something about a freight mover in the level two warehouse exploding when Carolina had thrown something at it. She remembered being terrified there was a plague cloud outside when they burst through the doors to the outside, leaving the men behind them at risk from not wearing helmets. 

Not that there was a single cloud in the sky, of course. 

“Oh you know, the usual,” Carolina answered the white helmeted woman sitting behind the wheel as she threw herself into the passenger side seat and turned her rifle back toward the minor complex that was C2-R0N's above ground presence. She sprayed bullets at the advancing forms for a bit until the jeep was thrown into drive. “You see Flowers?”

“That lunatic?” the woman behind the wheel laughed. “Got out here about an hour ago, waved cheerfully, got on that strange excuse for a motorcycle and just drove off.”

“Which we should be doing ourselves, Niner,” Carolina countered. 

“Roger, Lina,” the woman answered, and Connie dropped one of her blades into the foot well, barely missing her own foot, as her hand came up to brace against the roll bar. This woman drove like a lunatic! “Hey, if you dropped that bloody, pointy-stick of yours and hurt _anything_ in my lady, I'm going to throw you back to Charon.”

“Niner, calm down,” Carolina sighed, and Connie fumbled for the blade, bringing it up to clean the blood off of it with the rag Carolina tossed back at her head. She carefully cleaned one then the other and slid them both back into their sheathes. 

“Sorry,” Connie mumbled, shaking her head. Somehow the helmet felt more claustrophobic now than it had before. “Wasn't ready for us to go.”

“Well them buckle up, princess, because we're going either way. Seriously, Lina, what is this thing you picked up. She looks like a merc, she _moves_ like a merc, but she's greener than Georgia's dirty laundry,” the driver, Niner if Carolina was right, laughed. 

“I'm not a...” Connie started to protest, but was cut off by Carolina. 

“Oh, just a souvenir,” Carolina laughed. “She helped me get out. Pretty good in a pinch. Real potential.”

“Great, another one of those 'great potential' kids you keep finding.”

“Am I ever wrong?” Carolina laughed, shaking her head. 

“The problem is, you're not.”

Connie watched the conversation bounce back and forth between the two woman, utterly at a loss for what was going on. 

“Either way, CT, this is Four-Seven-Niner, or just Niner. She's pretty much the best wheel woman money can buy. Or, as I like to call her, the exit plan.”

“You're so kind,” Niner sighed. “How far we taking this one?”

“Well, she sort of did just lose her job,” Carolina joked. “So I guess... home?”

“You're good at picking up strays.”

“I'm not a...” Connie started to protest yet again, and once more she was cut off, this time by the woman in white. 

“Listen, kid, let me make something very clear here,” Niner said, voice level and deadly serious. “When you're in my car, I am not only the boss and the motherfucking queen. I am _god_ and you don't talk back to a deity, do you?”

“No,” Connie quickly agreed, certain that if she didn't there would be trouble. 

“Quick learner,” Niner chuckled, and Carolina just nodded. “Anyway, if Lina says you're home bound, then you're coming all the way back to Gulch with us, like it or not. From there what happens to you is her business. For now, I am the teat at which your miserable ass existence is suckling at, and if you bite, I'm knocking all your teeth out and you have to walk. Understood?”

“Understood,” Connie mumbled. 

“I can't hear you, greenhorn. I said do you understand?”

“Yes ma'am!” Connie shouted, and couldn't help but smirk at the way the woman in front of her flinched from the volume. 

“Well, no need to shout. But so long as we're clear... what _are_ your plans, Carolina?”

The woman in the pale blue helmet just chuckled to herself, and Connie sighed. 

She had a feeling that not only was she not going to know for a long time, but that these two women were somehow going to be fixtures in her future.

Thing was? 

She didn't think she minded all that much.

After all, she did owe them her life.

More than that, Carolina, meaning to or not, had bought Connie's freedom. Sure, she was going to have to figure out a new way to support her mother, but as her head fell back and she stared up at the expansive, too-blue sky, she couldn't help but smile and know that it was worth it. 

Would be just for this chance to see the limitless wonder of the sky.


End file.
